Caressingly gentle days as our wind ever so slowly dissipates into … thin air. The sky, pale as an egg shell, hosts but the occasional cloud now, a ragged, shrunken, emaciated cotton ball, panting for moisture. Only the sapphirine sea is unchanged; heaving slowly, awaiting the next development with abyssal patience. Nothing lost to time, it thinks. Nothing lost.

Mo ghosts along at 3 knots. Fast enough to maintain steerage but slow enough that the other world, the world hidden by wind and happy waves, comes into view. Man-a-war jellies, misshapen bubbles with spindly blue tentacles, a small red jelly the size of a crimini mushroom, a surface animal that looks like a flower petal in the shape of the button off a man’s dress shirt, another that looks like a used dentist’s swab. Egg sacks of various shapes, spheres, tubes, ameboids. Then there are mysterious flashes of silver from further down.

Suddenly a larger object. A sausage in form but long and bent, translucent red, about as wide as a sock and probably five feet long. Quickly gone. And finally our persistent friend, the Halobate, the only insect of the ocean, a flax seed with legs, a white sea skater madly darting across the surface.

On days like this I want to drop the sails and drift for a week. Just to watch. The sea is like a desert. It opens slowly and you must be very still to see it.

But work too. The other eye splice in the topinglift is now done. The jiffy reef lines have been cut and moved down to remove the worn parts. I did a head for tail on the #2 genoa sheets. The aft ends never get more use than coiling down and are essentially new.

I shot the moon again this morning. And at twilight will aim for the stars, Vega, Deneb, Fomalhaut, Antares. Then, later, Mercury and Jupiter will descend to the horizon as one. Scorpius will follow. Orion will rise. Then the moon will rise. On and on.

One Comment on “Ghosting Along”

Randall, sometime if you see a glob of seaweed, spear it with a boat hook and put it into a bucket of sea water. It is Just Simply Amazing to see all the tiny miniature sea life that lives in one glob of seaweed. My children would spend hours and hours on deck, after getting a new world of sea life into a single bucket of water. Small creatures abound! It is magic! It is wonderful!